(c) 1994 Michael B. Scher This
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I. Introduction, General Discussion,
Steps to Thinking About Schizophrenia

In "Minimal Requirements for a Theory of
Schizophrenia," Gregory Bateson (1972: 244-70 [1955]) argued
that explanatory perspectives on schizophrenia that depended on
the boundaries of the individual (in a "Newtonian"
perspective) or conversely on a view of the condition as entirely
socially constituted (in a "Berkeleyan" perspective)
could not hope to encompass the condition. For Bateson and many
others who were to follow him, schizophrenia did not merely
manifest itself in communication troubles, but existed at the
level of basic inter-human communication. Thus, models fashioned
on individual problems in communicating or thinking, or models
taking the condition as strictly between persons in a
'schizophrenic context' fail to take into account the entire
communicative system. As Bateson noted, schizophrenia, as a
condition, seemed to be of a communicative nature both in
origins, manifestation, and substance, and should thus be
examined as taking place in the active perceiver, and in the
perceiver's interaction with a context, including other active
perceivers.
For Bateson and the subsequent "family therapy"
movement, this view suggested the researcher seek out
communicative systems that seemed to engender schizophrenic
patterns of communication. Simultaneously, there was a move to
locate schizophrenia in biological roots (Barrett ms.:39-43),
each side being drawn to discover the origins of a condition
describable only as an amalgamated set of behavioral symptoms. In
Bateson's terms, each side was being drawn to Berkeleyan or
Newtonian extremes in pursuit of schizophrenia's origin; in
Robert Barrett's terms, they were each being drawn to these poles
in pursuit of an essentially indefinite wild goose, a cultural
category the form of which varies in accordance with social
configurations of power, category, and symbol. This paper seeks
to examine schizophrenia as a condition of communication writ
large, in Ruesch and Bateson's (1968) sense of communication as
perception, gestalten encoding and decoding, value hierarchy, and
conceptual category (1968:168-211).
As such, a look at those behaviors taken as paradigmatically
schizophrenic and those behaviors of patients taken as confirming
the diagnosis of "schizophrenia" can lead us to a
conception of schizophrenia as a cultural condition, in all
senses of the phrase.
In calling schizophrenia "a cultural condition" or even
"a condition of culture," I mean to both acknowledge
that schizophrenia manifests in a given society as a cultural
category and in the persons so categorized as a condition
relating to their fundamental divergence from certain kinds of
"normal" cultural understandings. This paper's
viewpoint diverges significantly from such writers as Barrett and
Ian Hacking in that, while it acknowledges that schizophrenia's
outline as a condition does exist as a culturally-constructed
category, its manifestation is a problematic mode of dealing with
cultural categories, modes, and practices. This is to say that
schizophrenia is such a slippery item for researchers because it
manifests as an aberration in, and difficulty with, precisely the
same fabric on which its form is viewed. Schizophrenia can thus
be seen as essentially cultural in that it manifests as an
apparently different cultural perspective from the 'norm,'
presenting both the "schizophrenic" and surrounding
society with a "schism" between their (culturally
presumed) grounds for communication, and leading to a basing of
the category "schizophrenic" on those problematic,
contemporary cultural grounds for communication -- communication,
again, in Ruesch and Bateson's sense.
Barrett's essay provides a useful perspective on the development
of the diagnosis as one resting ultimately on a particularized
perception of the social unit, the individual, in modern Western
society. He notes that Pitted against the Western concept of the
individual as bounded and discrete, is the concept of
schizophrenia as unbounded or diffused individuality. This
principle of permeability pervades twentieth century discourse on
schizophrenia, both at the level of the category and the
realization of that category in the referent, the patient (ms.:
33).
Barrett argues that not only the creation of the category, but
its actual realization in the 'patient' conforms to this idea of
identity-breaking that is fundamentally Western. Barrett claims
to avoid making any conclusions as to whether the conditions
termed schizophrenia have, indeed, any basis outside their
cultural construction, and seems to disagree with Szasz's (1973)
denunciation of most mental illness as constructed as power games
between psychiatrists and patients, patients and their families,
patients and society (Barrett ms.:58). However, he wants to
present the category "schizophrenia" as a problematic
of Western culture, a gestalt figure which may be interpreted
against the background of Western concepts of the person and
[has] argued that 'the schizophrenic' emerges as a marginal and
ambiguous category, both an agent of meaningful action and not an
agent of meaningful action - a person and not a person (Barrett
ms.:70).
What Barrett has exposed is on the one hand the banal idea that
any category is ultimately arbitrary, and tied together by some
set of selected, gestalten points of reference--that all
categories are ultimately cultural categories. On the other hand,
he concludes that schizophrenia's particular shifting, and ever-
receding nature, its apparent reconstitution as a problem with
every medical paradigmatic shift, suggests that
"schizophrenia is a socially organized moral category"
and therefore, "useful insights can be gained into this
disorder by cultural analysis" (Barrett ms.:70). I would
augment this position by adding that not only is schizophrenia a
"socially organized moral category" and a
"plurivocal symbol" of "nature overwhelming
culture" (Barrett ms.: 70), but that as a cultural category,
it is a category about cultural categories; schizophrenia may
therefore be seen as problematic because it is a cultural
category about people's employment of cultural category. It is a
clinical and colloquial metadiscourse describing the unusual
divergence of some persons from a cultural communicative
order--an order that seems transparent and given to those in it.

II. Approaching a Perspective on
Schizophrenia

As we have discussed, theories about schizophrenia that seek its
'origins' or causes enter into an irreducible paradox between
schizophrenia constituted as a cultural category describing
certain modes of behavior, and schizophrenia as a condition of
differentiated cultural categorization at a basic level. R. D.
Laing unintentionally captured the paradox neatly when he noted
that
To regard the gambits of Smith and Jones as due primarily to some
psychological deficit is rather like supposing that a man doing a
handstand on a bicycle on a tightrope 100 feet up with no safety
net is suffering from an inability to stand on his own two feet.
We may well ask why these people have to be, often brilliantly,
so devious, so elusive, so adept at making themselves
unremittingly incomprehensible (Laing 1967:85).
Laing's quote was meant to describe schizophrenia theories based
primarily on biological 'deficits,' but applies as well to the
anti-psychological position that schizophrenic patients are
compensating for particularly problematic social situations.
Subsuming the whole of schizophrenic experience under the notion
of a social strategy, even an unwitting one, is easily as extreme
a position; as Barrett notes, the more rigorous the study of
social context and schizophrenia, the less the condition seems
connected with any particular kind of social stress and the more
theories of it seem politically inspired (Barrett ms.:67).
Theorizing about schizophrenic origins has led to various
perspectives both of what the condition is and what causes it.
These questions of locus and origin remain unresolved, and
perhaps as Barrett asserts, unresolvable, in the morass of the
paradox I described and the politicization of social categories
that affect one's social relations and volition. Recent theories
about schizophrenia have tended to question the presumptions that
the disease is debilitating, permanent, necessary, or even
abnormal. Thus, we find such researchers as R. D. Laing calling
the condition, "a special strategy that a person invents in
order to live in an unlivable situation" (Laing 1967:95), in
an anti-psychiatric position in which the patient is seen to be
no less normal than anyone else, adopting a particularly sensical
solution to peculiar problems. Laing also supposed that the
episode might be a sort of natural process of passage brought on
in certain kinds of social conditions, biological or not in
nature, that something curtails, derails or reroutes into
permanent liminality. Laing does not mention Victor Turner's
notion of the ritual as entry, liminality, and reintegration
stages, but his description mirrors it perfectly, and he wonders
whether the "illness" is little more than a natural
human event being over analyzed, and ultimately interfered with
in a culture that has developed norms against such things (Laing
1967:106-7).
Viewing a condition or even "disease" as natural or
normal is itself, however, a matter of contextualized cultural
judgment. As Bateson points out, the pathologies of a system
"arise precisely
because the constancy and survival of some larger system is
maintained by changes in the constitutive subsystems"
(1972:339). This position is not functionalist, but rather
cybernetic, based on the tendency of massive numbers of
interacting components (limitless, really) to reach an
equilibrium state, which, while it changes, does so in a
generally oscillating fashion that can be described from a
sufficiently external perspective (itself indescribable from its
own vantage). Thus, "illness" of a mental or physical,
biological or genetic sort can be viewed as natural or normal and
can be seen to have a function within a higher order. The
schizophrenic patient "is" adaptive to problematic
family life; the plague of typhoid "moderates" the
over-concentration of human societies.
Labeling it "normal" or not brings us no closer to
understanding fundamentally what is going on in those people
whose behaviors are such that we apply the category schizophrenia
to them or their context. For typhoid, we might want to ask what,
if anything, is there in the condition of some people that makes
us want to place their conditions together in a diagnostic
category, and second, what, if anything, in those persons'
socio-cultural contexts has made this commonality of symptom
possible. Similarly, for schizophrenia, we should be asking first
what, if anything, is there in the behavior of some people that
makes us want to place them together in a diagnostic category,
and second, what, if anything, in their socio-cultural contexts
makes this categorization possible. Perhaps desire to
"cure" people of their "condition" overran
understanding what actually constituted that condition,
fundamentally, and founded the discourse about schizophrenia's
causes. Whatever the case, before one can begin to examine what
"causes schizophrenia," one should examine the general
nature of the conditions placed in the socially-constituted
category "schizophrenia." Thus, R. D. Laing's approach,
which begins with finding the 'cause' of 'schizophrenia' in the
"whole social context in which the psychiatric ceremonial is
being conducted" (1967:86) has jumped the gun in failing to
first establish what exactly the condition is. If anything, for
Laing, the condition "schizophrenia" is a myth built
around some normal behavior responses to difficult situations;
but he fails to ask what is it to ordinary people that makes the
schizophrenic so profoundly strange--and what in schizophrenic
behavior exactly is different?
In describing his views, Laing cites Garfinkel's work on
degradation ceremonies, making it the more peculiar that he
doesn't look into what "the schizophrenic" does
phenomenologically. Instead, Laing describes the condition
causally--he may be "correct," but it leaves him to
play in the confused definitional game we discussed above,
perhaps giving him a useful perspective that may help some people
to live happier lives, but bringing him no sharper an
understanding of what about the people he is dealing with is
itself different from others. While providing a delimited set of
behavioral criteria through which to classify patients, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III-R (DSM III-R) accomplishes
little more than Dr. Laing in defining any criteria that form the
essence of the condition. The DSM III-R does, however, attempt to
separate "prodromal" or superficially occurring
symptoms from those that may be elicited from interaction and
conversation with the patient. Barrett would likely note that
these primary diagnostic symptoms are an outgrowth of, and remain
dependent on, a psychiatric practice in which certain kinds of
patient-doctor interactions occur; here we will note that they,
too, are prodromal, and like the DSM III-R's prodromal list,
should be seen as the manifestation of some underlying situation.
As far as the DSM III-R, and most psychiatrists are concerned,
that underlying condition is "schizophrenia," and
"schizophrenia" is either "environmentally,"
"biologically," or "genetically"-caused; or
caused by some combination of them, never reaching the question
of what this underlying condition is in terms of the mindset of a
person from some particular socio-cultural milieu (Hurlburt
1990:259).
Nevertheless, the DSM III-R provides a useful guide to those
superficial behaviors that, when coinciding, are considered the
hallmark of the "schizophrenic." Among these are :
A. Presence of characteristic psychotic symptoms in the active
phase: either (1), (2), or (3) for at least one week (unless the
symptoms are successfully treated):

(1) two of the following:
(a) delusions
(b) prominent hallucinations [. . .]
(c) incoherence or marked loosening of associations
(d) catatonic behavior
(e) flat or grossly inappropriate affect
(2) bizarre delusions (i.e., involving a phenomenon that the
person's culture would regard as totally implausible [...])
(3) prominent hallucinations [...] of a voice with content having
no apparent relation to depression or elation, or a voice keeping
up a running commentary on the person's behavior or thoughts, or
two or more voices conversing with each other
B. [lessened functionality in social contexts]
C. [not another disorder]
D. Continuous signs of the disturbance for at least six months
[requiring ONLY a one-week active phase with or without residual
or prodromal phases]

Residual and prodromal phases are followup or
lead-in periods in which the patient evidences any of:
role-fulfillment problems, social isolation, "markedly
peculiar behavior," "marked impairment in personal
hygiene and grooming," flat or strange affect,
"digressive, vague, overelaborate, or circumstantial speech,
or poverty of content of speech," "odd beliefs or
magical thinking," unusual perceptual experiences, and a
loss of drive. In glossing the DSM III-R's list, one might say
the schizophrenic is one who perceives and reacts in strange
ways, evidences peculiar causal and categorical associations, and
generally fails to live up to community standards of behavior.
Barrett describes the psychiatric description of schizophrenia as
"located on and generated by" the "deeply
seated" paradox of the person as biological isolate and
social being (Barrett ms.:9), essentially indicating for our
purposes that the psychiatric view of the underlying
"symptoms" assembles them into a category,
"schizophrenia" already mediated through a discourse
about social and individual persons. We, however, must admit,
something is going on when a person can "speak a different
diction" in their own view and be "delusional" in
another's (Hurlburt 1990:195); when a person begins to deviate
wildly from social and cultural norms and understandings that
others not only take as given, but to which others always refer
their behavior,[1] we must wonder why these people are no longer
persuaded back into alignment with such a wide array of
behaviors. Perhaps these people are not merely adopting a
strategy, or acting a certain way, but instead are experiencing,
"a way to be crazy, at least in an industrial/romantic,
Protestant society" (Hacking 1991:844). We should wonder not
only why them, but also, which kinds of behaviors are different.
What is that way? Any attempt to answer that question must take
into account what is known about human behavior and biology in
order to describe what behaviorally and chemically is taken as
setting "the schizophrenic" apart from others in the
culture. For example, while a genetic 'source' is suspected, none
has been found, and indeed, the simple one-gene-wrong notion that
may work with some ailments seems to not hold in schizophrenia,
as studies on heredity and twins has begun to show. More complex
biochemical models may also take into account social factors,
triggers, etc. (Barrett ms.:41-2). Nevertheless,
"schizophrenics" do respond to certain classes of
"anti-psychotic" medications which allow them to act in
manners that we would class as more normal, i.e.,the evidencing
fewer of the factors taken as indicative of the condition. Among
these is Sandoz product "Clozaril" famed
forschizophrenics bringing some of the most severely affected
(thoseothers) into completely unable to interact in what is taken
as a "meaningful" way by astonishingly
"normal" modes. Such a markedthe former difference,
subjectively, is noticed by symptomaticallergic to the
schizophrenic, that a class of them who have turned out to be
fatally drug (it acts as an immune systemto continue depressant
on them) are suing Sandoz for the right taking the medication.[2]
Something besides a "strategy" or "ritual" is
going on, certainly, but we must also take into account that
human thought, emotion, and whatever other human state of being
we want to describe has or manifests a chemical component. Even
R. D. Laing tempered his socio-strategic position and said
"that the biochemistry of the person is highly sensitive to
social circumstance" (Laing 1967:94), and so it would be no
surprise to him if a social "cause" produced a chemical
"result" curable with another chemical, an
"anti-psychotic" drug. "Happy," we should
note, is a chemical as well as emotional state, and can be
"cured" (i.e. changed) by the introduction of another
chemical substance (which we can for our purposes here call an
"anti-jubilant"). In Bateson's view, there is a naive
artificiality in viewing the emotional or psychic state as
separate in any way from the chemical; the division of human into
sub-systems of mental versus chemical, or individual versus
social, is artificial, and dependent primarily on the classifying
observer's purposes (Bateson 1973:319). What we are left
"knowing" then are the characteristics by which we
select out those we will term "schizophrenic" and the
behaviors evidenced by those persons themselves: our society's
cultural categories and the evidence we have for theirs.

III. Schizophrenia as a Communicative (Dis)order

When Robert Barrett notes that "schizophrenia" is a
multi-faceted symbolic category dependent on certain cultural
preconceptions (ms.:70), he is referring to the symptoms taken as
constituting the "condition." He is not saying that
some underlying disorder cannot exist, nor is he saying one must.
This section will show how what constitutes the symptoms depends
on certain cultural preconceptions precisely because
schizophrenia is a condition affecting such preconceptions. One
who is "schizophrenic" is one who does not perceive,
act, conceive, or interact as others expect they should, on a
certain kind of level; and one who does not perceive, act,
conceive, or interact as others expect they should, on a certain
kind of level, is termed a schizophrenic. It is not merely the
giving of surprise or appearance of eccentricity; and yet there
is a range of degree, one end of which could well be termed
"merely eccentric." Once we examine critically what
differentiates schizophrenic behavior fromwe 'normal' behavior in
those societies that recognize it as a condition, can begin to
discuss what is at the core of thatsome kind of behavior
deviance, and perhaps why cultures do not recognize
"it" as a condition.
One approach to examining "schizophrenic" behavior is
to begin with linguistic behavior. Language, since Saussure's
Course, has been studied in intricate detail, and a wealth of
tools, methods, and terms come to the researcher. Wrobel's
Language and Schizophrenia criticizes the "classical"
approach to schizophrenia in which the patient is held to be
making a confused use of the langue in the formulation of
confused parole. The problem under general thinking about
schizophrenia, is that the patient's thinking, for whatever
reason (biological, environmental), has become confused, and it
evidences itself in language confused in both subject matter and
formulation. Wrobel takes the position that schizophrenic speech,
and quite probably most other behavior, adheres to a langue
particular to the schizophrenic, and often, differing from their
host culture's langue in predictable ways (Wrobel 1989:5).
Wrobel's view is consistent with Hurlburt's (1990) study of
schizophrenic and "normal" inner experience, in which
it was found many people experienced thinking without precise
words, and speaking without preformulative thought. If some
difference occurs at a deeper level, of "langue," which
may be taken in this context as the internalized preconscious
formal aspects of symbolic activity within a culture, then the
"schizophrenic" would be acting according to a
partially independent cultural logic, causing both others and
self communicative distress and possibly leading to withdrawn,
frustrated, angry, paranoid, or other secondary--but
"symptomatic"--behaviors.[3] Wrobel starts from John
Cutting's (1985) Psychology of Schizophrenia conclusions that
schizophrenic speech is less predictable than that of
"normals" (and they have a hard time predicting
"normal" speech), that their primary disturbances are
at the pragmatic level of speech, and that they otherwise employ
language "normally" (though there is some evidence that
their division of phonemes may drift) (Wrobel 1989:9). From
there, Wrobel moves in "an 'antipsychological' direction . .
. toward an anthropological approach" (1989:10).To Wrobel,
as with Bateson, the realm of communication is one of active
perception, in which speech is the active alteration of context
by an actor who is both part of that context and a vehicle for
its change. For Bateson, communication included perception, an
at-least partially acquired mode of divvying experience through
gestalt value systems that "encode" raw experience into
cognizable experience. From the traditional approaches to
schizophrenia, Wrobel desires only to take the notion that
"the schizophrenic experiences differently" (ibid.);
but this is not a viewpoint like Laing's, in which the condition
is understood as an outcome of some causality. Rather, Wrobel
seeks to understand schizophrenia by examining those behaviors
taken to be characteristic of it. A conclusion he draws is that
Although logic categories of schizophrenics are often not any
less rational than ours, they do not enjoy our acceptance . . .
[because] schizophrenic attitudes go beyond the expectations of
"normal" men (1989:11 italics mine).
Which is to say that they "go beyond" the communicative
presuppositions, not only in their langue, but also in the
pragmatics that turn langue into comprehensible parole. In
Bateson's terms, they have somehow integrated a different
encoding process from the norm at the perceptual and speaking
levels (see Ruesch and Bateson 1968:169). Hurlburt's analyses of
several "normal" and "schizophrenic" persons'
descriptions of inner experience similarly leads him to the idea
that schizophrenics may be perceiving and reconcepualizing the
world in a manner different from others in their culture, but
that they are doing so in an essentially comprehensible manner.
Hallucination, for example, may be the perception of what we call
recollected images as though they were as present as what we call
"physical reality," an interpretation divergent from
ours only in that it essentially recognizes that all our
"real" perception occurs in our heads as well (Hurlburt
1990:162).
The development of a different set or partially different set of
perceptual "values" (in Bateson's communicative/gestalt
sense) might lead to subjective experience sufficiently divergent
from others' that descriptions and talk about such things cannot
bring the experiences into the general consensus of description,
particularly when the perceptual values attached to communicative
exercises also somewhat differ. With "inner experience"
as examined by Hurlburt, the situation might be even more
attenuated, as the interpretation of inner experience is rarely
discussed, and idiosyncratic ways of thinking about it could well
develop in "healthy" minds. Thus, we find one of
Hurlburt's informants experiencing what we might call
"feelings that he should keep social distance" as a
"force field," what we would call continual verbal
annoyance through asking irritating questions as
"phasers," etc. (Hurlburt 1990:210).
Wrobel noticed that schizophrenics tend to class objects not by
common "similarity" but instead by preference, even
when asked to class by similarity (1989:28). Ordinarily, we take
such similar characteristics to be in the objects, an aspect of
them. For the people Wrobel studied, either such similarities
were inaccessible to them, and so they classed by preference,
which was accessible, or perhaps they found theunderstandable
"similarities" by which "normal" people class
to be arbitrary, when explained, but frustratingly
unpredictablelocation, use, smell, or (class by color, shape,
size, what? theythat is always grounded might ask), and so fall
into the habit of selecting by one referent for them: their
preference.apply, we begin to see how Whatever motivational
theory one wants to schizophrenic communicative
behaviorarbitrary, and is on the one hand random,
incomprehensible, and on the other, asculture, albeit a
ultimately comprehensible as any foreign culture of one.
Wrobel elucidates his statement that schizophrenic
"attitudes go beyond the expectations" of ordinary
interaction in his study of the pragmatics of schizophrenics'
speech. He notes that a failure to satisfy the receiver's
expectations of pragmatics pervades schizophrenics' speech.
Essentially, the "schizophrenic" is one who
communicates (Ruesch & Bateson's sense, including perception
at its root levels) differently from those raised in similar
contexts. For some reason or reasons, the person does not
perceive, speak, or associate quite as others do, nor do they
employ in the same way the ground upon which communication in the
society rests. This has several levels, but primarily we find the
behavior on the "pragmatic" rather than syntactic or
phonological, in the involvement with, interpretation of, and
application of social devices within contexts.
In Wrobel's terms, the schizophrenic employs a different ground
for communicative understanding at the pragmatic, and often
deictic, levels, particularly with regard to notions of time and
the organization of stories. Similar general referents ("not
much" "lots" "long ago" for examples)
were regularly interpreted differently from "normal"
usage, though specific referents ("six"
"yesterday") were interpreted the same or in a
radically metaphoric manner (1989:31-2). Schizophrenics tend not
"to take into account the conventions applied in
correspondence and the social role of the addressee" and
exhibit a "destabilization of the main element (I) of the
primary elements of reference," causing "a
destabilization of the remaining elements (here, now)"
(1989:40).
These differences in indexical referential grounding, social role
and contextual conventions may well explain the "flat or
inappropriate affect" the DSM III-R attributes to
schizophrenia: a failure to recognize (or even perceive)
contextual clues as to proper affect, as to the "kind"
of context, would lead the schizophrenic to repeated errors of
affect, eventually leading to a preference for no affect, for
there is little social reward for proper affect, but extreme
forms of punishment for inappropriate affect in the wrong kind of
context. In his discussion of affect and context-recognition,
Hurlburt notes that while the schizophrenics with whom he worked
did exhibit flat affect, it is only the outward expression of
emotion that is flat in some of our subjects, not its inner
apprehension. Our schizophrenic subjects did have clear inner
emotional experience (1990:260).
Thus, the schizophrenic flat affect is like disordered speech,
the surface manifestation of an underlying inability to
synchronize with the "normal" pragmatics of
communication and perception in their society. This paradigmatic
problem with social role, attributable to problems in
interpreting context, can be taken to underlie the
social/individual tension that Barrett sees as underlying most
discussion of schizophrenia (ms.: 8).
In Ruesch and Bateson's communications model, where perception is
essentially gestalten, one's inability to interpret context
leaves one with minimal knowledge of some 'thing' perceived, a
negative case that will remain essentially undefined for the
perceiver (1968:197-208). Further, taking their position that
inter-personal communication is the active use of context as
perceived with an assumed understanding of the other's view of
the context, one can see how a person with some difficulty
accessing not only what another means by some perhaps
communicative action, but also difficulty predicting the other's
reaction to anything, might come to see the world in a
particularly peculiar way. Bateson also points out that the
conventions of communication, "communication
agreements," are of the same ilk as any social conditioning:
forms of expectations of conditions prevailing in some
gestalt-recognizable context (1968:212-27).
This communicative impasse can actually be described as a
fundamental disparity between the manner in which the individual
interprets (perceives) contexts and the way in which others of
the same culture do. Wrobel quotes Anna Gruszecka's 1923 and 1924
works on schizophrenia with regard to this topic, in sum agreeing
with her that schizophrenic communication is the result of
differential perceptions pressed into different conceptions of
the language. Gruszecka also discussed the remarkableways
similarities between schizophrenic thinking and many other
cultures' of thinking, relating many modes to "normal"
modes in other cultures (Wrobel 1989:16-18). Neither she nor I
mean to assert that schizophrenia does not "exist" as
an underlying problem with one's own culture; only that it exists
not as a particular kind of thinking but as a condition of a
person who has not internalized the same perceptual/conceptual
matrix of expectations and communicative precepts as his or her
contemporaries.
Taking Gruszecka and Wrobel's perspective, we can examine the
extreme paradigmatic "symptom of schizophrenia," the
hearing of voices. The DSM III-R's definition of
"hallucinations" taken to be schizophrenic almost
exclusively covers verbal/auditory events; hallucinations of a
visual nature are taken to be only the schizophrenic granting
images in the mind more than the metaphoric presence they
deserve. Our working thesis is that the schizophrenic condition
is one of having a radically variant understanding of ordinary
events from one's culture; if hallucination is to be taken into
account, then we must find that the "normal" person in
Western society also experiences voices, but gives them a
different attribution than the "schizophrenic."
Hurlburt's study evidenced several "normal" persons who
experienced inner voices, including two who had a set of voices,
some of which had names by which they could be discussed. These
people all "knew," however, that the voices were their
own, despite their often spontaneous-seeming character, and
despite "inner speaking sometimes [seeming to] have a mind
of its own" (Hurlburt 1990:147). If the ordinary person can
experience voices in their mind, whatever they choose to call it,
or how they choose to perceive them, will be in part determined
by their cultural conditioning; when someone interprets these
differently, there is little social feedback to correct them, as
one's inner experiences do not often come up as a topic of
conversation. Taken as natural, these voices from outside the
schizophrenic's head could well fundamentally be the same as
"normal" experience, but will be perceived in a
fundamentally different manner.
The separation of the schizophrenic from ordinary cultural modes
of discussion was expressed by one inmate as his being a little
inventive, and so a little misunderstood. I have to go through
these things in order to get the proper concept, as they are
concepts in my perceptions (Hurlburt 1990:224).
The notion that some extra effort is necessary either to make
sense of the perceived world we take as given, or to communicate
our ordinary perceptions to others is alien to us; is alien to
most people in most cultures. Only when we talk with someone of a
different cultural background do we find ourselves challenged,
often in frustratingly subtle ways, to get our points across and
to comprehend the deep meaning of what is being said to us. We
meet as two context-manipulators with different ideas of how to
do so, and of what any arrangement means. This experience is
culture shock; in some sense, the title "schizophrenic"
is given to those who continually experience a kind of culture
shock in their own culture.
Wrobel describes this extra effort in his conclusory theses on
schizophrenia, in particular noting that because schizophrenic
perception of the world is different, the language structures of
the "normal" person in a culture cannot adequately
express the schizophrenic perceptions, and so its
"inventive" use sounds deformed (Wrobel 1989:119-21).
Language then becomes a source of frustration rather than
expression, and non-communication seems the norm. Wrobel also
suggests that the schizophrenics he has studied, from all over
Europe, east and west, and the United States, have slipped out of
their native langue understandings in similar ways (Wrobel
1989:121). Taking into account the notion that the condition is
essentially one of growing culture-shock in one's own culture,
the development of parallel experiences of communication
surprise, confusion, frustration, persecution, and failure, might
well lead to commonalities of schizophrenia cross-culturally; one
should also note that Wrobel can only study schizophrenic speech
in persons of cultures that recognize schizophrenia as a
condition in the first place.
Nevertheless, in the same vein that one acquires cultural
competence through sedimented experiences in various contexts,
general communicative preconceptions can be viewed as the
sedimented experiential impressions of social practice within a
social context additionally permeated with physical signs of
others' prior praxis.[4] Thus, discussion of experience, as well
as experience in certain contexts, may help shape our perceptions
in the future. We may all verbalize thoughts in our heads, but we
do not all count the thoughts as strictly our own, particularly
when such inner speech may have "characteristics of being
created anonymously, devoid of any direct connection to the
experiencer's present activity" (Hurlburt 1990:147). Thus,
we can see how social isolation could well play a factor in the
formation of "the schizophrenic." However, whatever its
causes, once the condition is seen as an essentially different
impression upon the individual of what are presumed to be similar
sedimented experiences, the significant aspect of schizophrenia
is that continued interaction with the "normal" culture
does not return the "sufferer" to "normal."
The DSM III-R's diagnostic guidelines could be fulfilled by
nearly anyone, except that the after-effects or primary phase
must persist for six months. If we consider the active phase of
the condition as a mind-shaking, frightening experience of seeing
one's sense of reality challenged by one's senses, the six month
"recovery period" becomes that recovery time in which
"normal" people reassimilate. The normal after-shock
experience is ultimately to slide towards the common mode again,
often presenting the experiencer with the feeling the experience
was unreal. We will call this the "oh, come on" device
inherent in most humans; one might also term it enculturation or
socialization behavior. What is peculiar about the schizophrenic
is that, upon starting the trail off normal perception, they do
not tend to return absent purposeful intervention. Instead,
perhaps strong-willed, they deepen their particularized
perspective and distance themselves from the "norm."
Certainly it is not odd behavior or bizarre understandings,
actions, and practices, that gets one labelled as schizophrenic,
at least not alone, or we would be labelling most foreign
travelers within our culture "schizophrenic."[5] We
must remember that, while "schizophrenia" is a socially
constituted diagnosis applied to someone, and not something
"in them" (whatever may in fact underlie the diagnosis)
(Laing 1967:99), and ask why funny-acting foreigners are not so
diagnosed, even for hearing voices (note that only one of the
three main DSM III-R diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia
mentions that the symptom must be abnormal for one's culture).
When we do so, we see that plainly, there is an understanding
that schizophrenia is the differentiating of a member of a
culture while within that culture. One who goes abroad and
returns with bizarre ideas or practices reflective of the place
they went, may be said to have been converted or to have
"gone native" but they are not crazy; just not one of
us.
One may even find within one's culture modes of practice, roles
or self-definitions that allow one to exhibit what would
otherwise be schizophrenic behaviors. But if the mystic or crazed
genius in some culture is acting in a socially-understood role,
then there are modes of communication through which, supposedly,
their experiences can be traded with others' (and so they're not
really schizophrenic). Thus, we find that not only must one
become differentiated from the 'norm' of perception/communication
in one's culture while in a culture where the new perceptual
modes are not normal, one must also do so in a way that renders
one undefined as a social actor, that places one beyond
meaningful communication. Barrett's project to expose the
paradigmatic roots of "schizophrenia" as a culturally
bound classificatory becomes significant here in that we can see
how projects to find and trace environmental causes of the
condition are in a way projects to normalize schizophrenia, in
the way a "foreigner," "mystic," or
"eccentric" is normalized: by tracing a route through
which apparently meaningful communication may occur.
However, we must not forget that Laing was foremost seeking to
help "schizophrenics" communicate again with the
'normal' world. As such, the project of normalizing, even
universalizing (see Laing 1967:103-07), schizophrenic experience
is one of re-establishing lines of communication with the
schizophrenic. In Laing's terms, it is going into the jungle to
find the Dr. Livingstone lost and going more 'native' all the
time, and discover how to talk with him again. In a fundamental
way, researchers looking for causal explanations of schizophrenia
are seeking to trace the path down which the schizophrenic lost
communications with "normal" culture, whether that path
can be retraced with restorative chemicals or discovering a key
past event that makes translation possible.

IV. Conclusions without Frontiers

I proposed that in writing this paper, I would forward no
particular origin for schizophrenia, and I will here reassert my
ambivalence as to its biological basis, genetic factor,
environmental trigger, double-bind origins, and so forth. The
project I set out requires only that there be some manner in
which one's basic perceptual/communicative preconfigurations
might become differentiated from the norm. Nor do I necessarily
disagree with R. Barrett's hypothesis that the category
"schizophrenia" is a socio-political construct the form
of which changes in a manner reflecting the underlying political
milieu. Indeed, it may well do so. My project, however, was to
ask, what, if anything, lies at the core of the category, and
inspires us to arrange some kind of classification around it? In
answering that question, I suggested we think about
schizophrenia's underlying set of commonalities as some kind of
orientation relative to one's particular cultural context.
Studies on the behavior and perception of persons classed
"schizophrenic" reveal a fascinating set of
commonalities, particularly in their development of a pragmatics
(even a langue) different from those employed by their cultural
contemporaries. If the condition is fundamentally a category
culturally-defined in essence as variance from certain pragmatic
grounds of communication, one can see how debates over whether
[social factors, biologic factors, genetic factors, formative-
years factors, and so on] are [necessary, sufficient, combined,
triggered, activated, suppressed, inherited, habituated, etc.],
to cause the individual to [show symptoms, become schizophrenic,
be formed as a schizophrenic], have proven fruitless (see Barrett
ms.:25-7). The debates have not been productive because the
particularized sets of behaviors that constitute the social
category schizophrenia could conceivably be brought about by any
of the causes in any combination of the causal manners discussed.
This paper examined the "symptoms" of schizophrenia,
and then discussed them in light of a theory of the condition as
essentially one of culture. In calling schizophrenia "a
condition of culture," I meant both that there is a cultural
category "schizophrenia" and that persons placed in
that category are so placed primarily for a particular kind of
divergence from "normal" cultural understandings.
"Schizophrenia" thus becomes an ever-receding category
when placed under causal analysis, for its tell-tale signs are
variations from the very class of cultural categorical
understandings that includes the category
"schizophrenia." Gregory Bateson was fond of noting
Bertrand Russell's demonstration that paradox is generated
whenever one has a "class of classes which are not members
of themselves" (Bateson 1972:186). We can see the
paradoxical aspects of schizophrenia existing as an aberration of
our normal cultural categorical modes for which we have a normal
cultural categorical mode. What we are left seeking to understand
is that which we perceive in the condition that inspires us to
categorically section it away from ordinary experience and in a
way normalize it through labelling. I hope in its preliminary,
somewhat schizophrenic in itself, way, this paper has moved us
toward a greater depth of that understanding.

[1]. Note that schizophrenia is not taken to be
social deviance. Deviance, unlike schizophrenia, is described in
reference to the social norm. In Foucault's (1970) terms, deviant
behavior is part of the same discourse as normal behavior;
schizophrenia, because "magical" or
"incomprehensible" is perhaps part of another
discourse, but certainly not part of "normal
discourse." In this, I differ from Laing, who feels that
schizophrenia is precisely a normal part of cultural events
because it is ultimately comprehensible, in that I would say that
its comprehensibility results from similar processes (of
enculturation, of perception and gestalt-creation) reaching
different ends.
[2]. Information is from personal communications with Ms. Heather
A. Mueller, who worked as an executive assistant to a director at
the New Brunswick, N.J. research division while the suit was in
progress, 1992-1993. The story was sporadically covered in
Newsweek, the New York Times, and other sources far less explicit
as to the nature of the underlying problem than was my informant.
[3]. Recall the DSM III-R's set of primary and residual
characteristics, and note how many of them would be
"normal" human reactions to the experience of not being
able to communicate with others or interpret their behaviors and
speech. Watzlawick discusses the differences between
"normal" and "schizophrenic" reactions to
supposed games that secretly are run on an arbitrary pattern: the
"normals" are apt to think either that it is too hard
or that there is no pattern; the "schizophrenic" is apt
to decide someone has lied or that there is a conscious
manipulation of the game taking place. Ironically, the
schizophrenic, if taken as primarily experiencing a communicative
schism with "normal" people, takes day to day
experiences of frustration and apparent deception by others and
reads it into such games as the most likely situation, and
happens to more accurately capture the situation than the
"normal person" (1976:53-4)
[4]. See for example, M. Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the
Acquisition of Language. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern U. Press,
1973.
[5]. I have, however, heard a quite believable story about the
speaker of a near-extinct Native American language who was
arrested for vagrancy, and nearly institutionalized with
"schizophrenia" before someone recognized that his
lingual peculiarities were a "real" language (i.e.,
belonging to an order of more than a single person).